Saturday 22 August 2009 19.01 EDT
First published on Saturday 22 August 2009 19.01 EDT

Huis Clos is a rum do. "Hell is other people" may have a clamorous ring as Jean-Paul Sartre's most famous mot, but is it much more than a domestic grumble? Sartre here imagines hell as a triangular relationship. His three characters, cast into an ill-defined limbo, go through the tortures of the damned but it's not evident that they do so because that's the human condition. Maybe it's just bad luck. Put a lesbian post-office worker and an ultra-heterosexual snobbish sexpot together and you're not going to get harmony.

Luke Kernaghan's production tangos with assurance through the metaphysical minefields, giving the play a political dimension. It evokes the Argentina of the Dirty War, with its torture and unaccountable incarcerations. When the trio link up, in a daisy-chain of damnation, they tango, to intermittent drumming. The faintness of the music is part of a hell of discomfiture: Southwark's dusky vault pongs of mustiness; anglepoise lights flicker; no one can raise a flame for a cig.

Southwark - with the Globe and the Menier - is part of the resurgent theatricality of London's South Bank, which double-resurges in the summer. Outside City Hall, Phil Wilmott's free, jaunty, well-attended and unfunded theatre productions have deservedly become a fixture. This year Jason and the Argonauts is a pantomimic, puppet-filled show aimed at children, while Stella Duffy's lively new version of Medea cleverly serves as its sequel, shrewdly turning the chorus into a group of journos and paps.

The National spills out of itself with the Watch This Space festival, making new arenas outside the built auditoria and filling them with fire. Literally in the case of Carbón Club, an incendiary Basque show, which sends flaming chariots rolling through the promenading audience and, with huge waves of orange fabric, engulfs its characters in licks of fire.

Across the courtyard, a small tent is set up for storytelling. This is the National's most far-sighted move: storytelling, which combines frugality, nostalgia and communal hunkering-down, is soaring in the credit crunch. In London there is storytelling at the Tristan Bates and the Canal Café theatres; the books festival at Edinburgh is host to New York storytelling salon the Moth, set up to recall memories of exchanging tales on Georgian porches on summer evenings. At the National, stories are delivered with thespian dash: a man with a frock coat and a reverberating baritone unravels an adult fairytale, founded on sex and gore - pretty much like the infant versions. This event should have a permanent place at the National, but the seating needs to be changed: the twee tent and weeny plastic pouffes, fine for tots, is too droop-inducing for adult minds and buttocks.